Autonomous vehicles, such as vehicles that do not require a human driver, can be used to aid in the transport of passengers or items from one location to another. Such vehicles may operate in a fully autonomous driving mode where passengers may provide some initial input, such as a destination, and the vehicle maneuvers itself to that destination. Thus, such vehicles may be largely dependent on systems that are capable of determining the location of the autonomous vehicle at any given time, as well as detecting and identifying objects external to the vehicle, such as other vehicles, stop lights, pedestrians, etc.
While such sensors come in many different configurations, as an example, such sensors may include (“light detection and ranging”) LIDAR sensors, radar units, cameras, etc. In the camera example, in addition to configuration, the cameras have various features such as gain, exposure time, etc. which must be set to particular values in order to obtain useful images. Typically, the exposure time is determined by algorithms based on the ambient lighting conditions and brightness of the lights to be detected. As such, these exposure times are often very short, for instance, on the order of microseconds. However, in the case of illuminated objects, while the human eye may see a solid continuous light, in actuality many illuminated objects actually flicker depending upon the frequency of the power grid (for instance, at 60 Hz) or whether the light (such as a light emitting diode (LED)) utilizes “pulse-width modulated light” (PWM). If these cameras were to sample something that has a short light pulse, then the likelihood of imaging that light pulse within a timespan of a few microseconds is low.